Workflows

With workflows you control when and where you want to receive notifications about issues, tunnel the right information to the relevant person or team, and enrich your issue's notifications with additional New Relic data.

What is an issue?

Issues are groups of incidents that describe the underlying problem of your symptoms. When a new incident is created, incident intelligence opens an issue and evaluates other open issues for correlations. For more information see Use Incident Inteligence.

For a look at workflows and destinations in action, watch this short YouTube video (3:54 minutes):

How are workflows triggered?

A Workflow is triggered by issue events for issues that match the workflow filter and their matching notification triggers. The workflow is configured with recommended triggers by default, but you can control when to trigger a notification for each destination by clicking on the 3 dots and then choosing Notify when. The Activated notification trigger must also be enabled. The following events trigger the workflow and send notifications to the relevant destination end-points:

Notification Trigger	Description	Example	Destinations Notified By Default
Activated	An issue is activated	The issue state changes from CREATED to ACTIVATED	All the destinations
Acknowledged	An issue is acknowledged by a user either through the a notification, the issue page, or a third party integration	The issue has been seen by a user and marked as acknowledged	Webhook, PagerDuty, Slack, Email, Mobile App
Closed	The issue has been closed.	The issue has been closed due to closing all its incidents, end of TTL, or has been Inactive for too long	All the destinations
Priority changed	The Issue's priority has been raised	An incident in the issue has moved from High priority and become a Critical priority issue	Webhook, Event Bridge, ServiceNow, Jira
Other updates	An incident got added to the issue, an incident was closed, or a different issue was merged to this one	An incident has been resolved	Webhook, Event Bridge, ServiceNow, Jira, PagerDuty (account integration)

Required capabilities

Using workflows require specific capabilities.

To access destinations: View capabilities for Applied intelligence > Destinations or Alerts.
To access workflows: View capabilities for Applied intelligence > Workflows.
To create workflows: Modify capabilities for Applied intelligence > Workflows and Applied intelligence > Channels.
To modify workflows: Modify capabilities for Applied intelligence > Workflows and all capabilities for Applied intelligence > Channels.
To delete workflows: Delete capabilities for Applied intelligence > Workflows and Applied intelligence > Channels.

Add a workflow

The workflows feature is located under the Alerts & AI menu.

Go to one.newrelic.com > Alerts & AI > Enrich and Notify > Workflow > Add a workflow.
Name your workflow. This field is mandatory and needs to be unique.
With workflows, filter your issues and send them to the relevant destination. You can build a query to filter the right issues.

Tip

To set up seperate notifications on WARNING incidents, filter by issues with a priority equal to HIGH (Warning).

Build a query by selecting an attribute, operator and value/s to narrow down the right issues you want to be passed on.

Tip

The workflows filter auto populates with data from past issues as well as some static values from the condition metadata (such as condition name). If you can't find the value you're looking for, type it in and select Enter new. A warning that the filter doesn't match any past issue sometimes occurs.

Recommended: filter issues by team tag so all teams can be notified when their entities are included in an issue. Steps can be found in the demo below:

For some tips on using tags, see this Explorers Hub post on workflow patterns.

Optional: Enrich your data.

Enrichments can give additional context on alert notifications by adding NRQL query results to them
The workflows enrich tool is similar to the query builder.
The NRQL query's results are included in the notification message.
If you create queries for your workflows, they run in real time and the query results are the value of the enricher.
You can save any valid query into your workflow, even if they return an empty result, but you must run the query before saving the enrichment. You can also query with issue-specific variables; for example {{entitiesData.ids}}
For enrichment examples, see Workflow data enrichment examples.
Note: The query name needs to be unique because you'll use the name to decide how to include the result in the payload of the notification that will be sent by the workflow.
Important
At this stage, visual representation of enrichments are sent to Slack and email. For Servicenow and JIRA destinations, we recommend to limit to NRDB queries with single value results. For example: count, min, or max.
The maximum number of enrichments per workflow is 2. The maximum number of variables an enrichment can contain is 1.

Notify: Choose one or more destinations and add an optional message.
Tip
In any destination channel, start typing and a variable menu will open up. You'll see the names of the variables, which will be replaced with the variable's values at runtime. To use the enrichers' results, use their name.

To save and activate a workflow, you need to include a notifier.
Setting up a notifier requires having a notification destination configured.
You can either set it up through the Destination menu item, or through the Create new destination item in the destination selection drop down in each destination channel screen.
A notification destination includes the credentials required to send a notification to a third party platform and an option to customize the message sent by mapping fields from our issues to fields in the destination platform.
To learn how to set up destinations and configure message templates, check the documentation on notifications.
(Optional) You can mark which notification you want to get for each notifier. Otherwise, notifications will be sent to each notifier by default.

Click update message once completing the notifier requirements
Optional: Test your workflow. We'll use existing data from your account to send a sample notification with your new configuration. The test only works if there are existing issues that match the filter. If there isn't any data, you'll see this message: We don’t see any issues matching your filter. That doesn’t mean it won’t work.
Click activate to complete the workflow.

Important

The initial limit to the number of workflows you can add is 1000 per account and the intial limit to filter size is 4096 characters per workflow. Please reach out to your account representative if you would like this number to be increased.

What is an issue?

How are workflows triggered?

Required capabilities

Add a workflow

Tip

Tip

Tip

Notifier

Important